Stush Presents History 1989-1996

Though the cassette had been around since the sixties and hard-plastic folders that could house multiples of them had surely been available in some form for at least as long, the DJ-mixed tape pack was a definitively nineties format. Those puffy boxes typically held six cassettes, all recorded at the same event, a kind of party-in-a-box souvenir for rave’s true believers. More accurately, they were popular with drum & bass heads—most D&B tape packs documented specific events, though they weren’t necessarily limited to them. Decades later, they flourish online: Rave Tape Packs is the starting point.

Stush Presents History 1989-1996, a six-tape extravaganza chronicling the London club night Stush, issued in 1996, may not be the greatest of all tape packs, but it might as well be. Featuring one cassette per year from 1990 to 1996, it’s a definitive step-by-step look back at D&B’s evolution. Top Buzz’s 1990 set is still recognizably house, but its highlights infra-glow bass lines, sprightly piano riffs, and shuffling breakbeats emerging beneath the four-four kicks are the building blocks of hardcore rave, and they take over on Rodney T’s 1991 set. On DJ Ron’s 1992 set, the rhythmic speed is frantic, but by Darren Jay’s 1993 tape, the scene’s producers have gained full control over them, leading to Jay’s glorious rewind of Omni Trio’s eternal “Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix).” The DJ speeds it up considerably.

The sharp rise in the number of DJs playing jungle in the mid-nineties can be gauged by Stush Presents History’s fifth and sixth tapes—each side gets a different DJ. By 1994, jungle was increasingly referred to as drum & bass, and the snares kept their speeds up but the rhythms were less hectic, the drums less attached to other instruments. The new minimalism had a distinctly jazz-funk cast, as Brockie’s 5A set shows, opening with Roni Size’s “Music Box”; DJ SS’s B-side, from 1995, flaunts more of a dancehall flair. But jungle wasn’t the future everybody thought it was in 1994 and 1995: The sixth tape on Stush Presents History swerve, enticingly, into UK garage, with Operator and Oaksie pitching up U.S. East Coast vocal house and dropping their peers’ homemade tweaks into the mix. What a time capsule.